Sophie spends the morning of her second birthday finger-painting her face and hair green while running around the backyard bottomless.

Ever carefree, she does not grasp the significance of a second birthday, or the stress it causes her parents.

One of us, anyway.

Six days before our wedding, my wife produced a private Duran Duran concert for 4,000 Microsoft employees. She has coordinated a convention in Beijing and a hospitality suite for the NFL's VIPs at the 2008 Saints-Chargers game in London.

These were mere rehearsals for Sophie's second birthday party.

Pent up ambition is partly to blame. Last year's Hurricane Gustav evacuation scuttled Sophie's first-birthday pool party. This time, she - mother and/or daughter -- would not be denied.

Menus are plotted, orders are placed, practice cakes are baked. To me, "baking a cake" means adding the egg, oil and milk to ready-made mix. Twenty minutes later, voila! A dependably delicious cake emerges from the oven looking just like the picture on the box.

My more ambitious wife insists on creating a cake from scratch. For two nights, our kitchen burns through more flour, sugar and eggs than Randazzo's at Mardi Gras. Every mixing bowl between Mid-City and Metairie is soiled. Five hours after Sophie goes to bed, her mother still toils in the kitchen. One creation is the size, if not the consistency, of a manhole cover.

In the end, we order a cake from Whole Foods.

The big morning dawns early. The party will take place at a friend's much roomier house. My wife will oversee the movement and set-up of gear and food, as well as the decorating.

My only task? Occupy Sophie while running two simple errands.

Speculation is rampant that we will arrive after the party starts. But 15 minutes before guests are due, I make a triumphant entrance, the baby in one arm, a bag of ice in the other.

I desperately, desperately wish I were. Somehow I spaced swinging by the bakery - even though "bakery" is clearly spelled out on the to-do list I was issued that morning. And Sophie failed to remind me.

Fifteen pounds of slow-cooked pulled pork now have no place to nestle.

Suppressing homicidal urges, my wife suggests I call a buddy who lives near the Binder bakery in Bywater. "You might as well do drugs," he cracks, "because you do the things that drug addicts do anyway."

Sophie, busy chasing a butterfly helium balloon, is unaware of the drama swirling around her. A bag of barbecue sauce ruptures on my wife's sandals. Our friend Christina picks up the cake, only to discover the decorator has renamed my daughter "Sophia." The errant "a" is successfully replaced with an "e."

The pistolettes show up soon after the first guests. But the birthday girl partakes of neither pork nor pistolette. She is saving herself.

She lays her hands upon the cake as if bestowing a blessing -- or judging whether the whole thing will fit in her stomach.

Seated at the table as her pint-size friends and cousins serenade her, she sports a rapturous grin. Suddenly all the effort and expense to produce this party is worth it.

By nap time, the whole thing is over; the wave has crashed and receded. An exhausted Mommy and daughter go home to sleep. Daddy works off his community service hours with the clean-up crew.

The day is deemed a success. "Birthday," my daughter now realizes, is a good thing.